To be successful online you need to get a lot of traffic to your site. One of the most effective, and free, methods for doing that is to use search engine marketing keyword targeting. Search engine marketing (SEO) is really just a way to make your website show up to the search engines.

Once they "notice" your site, they can rank your site high on the results page for the keyword term that you were targeting. The higher the rank of your website, the more people who will see it and go to it.

Think about it, when you do a search online do you look at any of the results that are on the second or third page of results? Most people don’t. Even if you do go to page 2 or 3, you probably don’t go much further.

So if you choose the right keywords to rank for and you end up on page one of the results, you will get a lot of visitors to your site. This is the whole concept behind search engine marketing keyword.

Of course, with this type of strategy, one of the most important things you can do is to find the right keywords to optimize your site around. And this all begins by doing keyword research.

For SEO you want very targeted and relevant keywords. If your website is all about bird houses, you don’t want to use keywords that aren’t relevant. If your site has nothing to do with bird watching, for example, you don’t want to use that as a keyword.

One of the things that search engines look for when ranking sites is relevance. How relevant is your site and how on target is the content of your site to the keywords you are trying to rank for? If you are very targeted you may get rewarded with a high ranking, if you aren’t targeted, you will be "punished" by a low ranking.

If your site is seasonal make sure you account for that in your marketing efforts. To use my example above about bird houses (and I apologize right now if I’m wrong in my next example, it is just an example) lets say that you decide to highlight bird houses for cardinals during the winter months.

You can then switch back and target bird houses for robins in the spring. You get the idea, keep it fresh, and current.

Keep an eye of your traffic levels. There may come a time when one of the keywords that had worked really well for you no longer pulls in the same amount of traffic. There are many reasons for this but the most common is that your niche has more competitors and more people are trying to rank for the same keyword (and maybe doing it better than you are).

When setting up your search engine marketing keyword campaigns, remember that your success will lie almost exclusively with choosing the right keywords. Use tools to help you with the process but ultimately, just try to think like your customers.